A Sweet, Fertile Soil for the Growth of Writers

"My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. It lies
flat, like a badly drawn half oval, with Memphis at its northern and
Vicksburg at its southern tip. Its western boundary is the Mississippi
River, which coils and returns on itself in great loops and crescents
... every few years it rises like a monster from its bed and pushes
over its banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made. For our soil,
very dark brown, creamy and sweet-smelling, without substrata of rock
or shale, was built up slowly, century after century, by the sediment
gathered by the river in its solemn task of cleansing the continent
..."--from Lanterns on the Levee, by William Alexander Percy, 1941.

There is something about Greenville that produces writers. Mr. Percy's
younger cousin Walker, whom he raised after Walker's mother died, is a
novelist whose books include The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman.
Shelby Foote, also a product of Greenville's schools, is a novelist and
historian who wrote a classic three-volume history of the Civil
War.

And the city is perhaps best known as the home of Hodding Carter,
the crusading journalist who founded The Delta Democrat-Times, the
newspaper in which he wrote the series of editorials--many of them
calling for racial tolerance--that won him a Pulitzer Prize in
1946.

As different as these writers are, they were all shaped in part by
the Delta. They and many others have written about it, usually with the
same sense of reverence and mystery as the elder Mr. Percy.

What distinguishes the Delta for these writers goes beyond terrain
and lifestyle and ambience. It includes the curious contradictions of
character--built up, like the Delta itself, over time--that have often
made the region's fierce loyalties and social compacts enigmatic to
outsiders.

Walker Percy tells, for example, that his cousin, at one point in
his varied life, lived briefly on the beach at Bora Bora, and that,
though he sometimes dreamed of returning there, he stayed in Greenville
and tried to run his plantation "according to the Golden Rule." William
Alexander Percy, though once touched by wanderlust, believed it a
worthy calling for a man to stay in his home town and do what he could
for the community.

The elder Mr. Percy's friend, David L. Cohn, a Greenvillian who went
north to write, also found the lure of the Delta hard to escape
entirely. Mr. Cohn, who served 50 years ago as The Atlantic Monthly's
"cabinet member for the South," wrote what is perhaps the most famous
single sentence about the region. In one of two books about the Delta,
published together in 1948 under the title Where I Was Born and Raised,
he declared

that "The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel
in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg."

To rediscover "this familiar-unfamiliar land" was something of a
lifelong enterprise for Mr. Cohn. In his collections of journalistic
essays, he described the Delta and its people as a region at once
violent and tragic, beautiful and proud, and altogether
contradictory.

'The One Indispensable Fact'

The first white settlers in the Delta--"pioneers with means" Mr.
Cohn called them--arrived in 1825 and created an economy based on huge
plantations run by the labor of large numbers of slaves. This system,
which failed to take root in the less fertile "Hill Country" of central
and east Mississippi, led to what he called "the one fact indispensable
to an understanding of this society": the preponderance of blacks in
the Delta population. "Here live 293,000 Negroes and 98,000
whites."

Mr. Cohn wrote of the strong friendships and emotional bonds that
developed between many whites and blacks in the midst of a totally
segregated and often oppressive Delta environment. Of the strict legal
ban on sexual intermingling between the races and the "miscegenation"
that was a common practice among white Delta men. Of murder and rape
and lynching. Of "hoodoo" and "the conjure man" coexisting with
organized religion and charismatic black preachers. Of the primitive
cabins of sharecroppers and the fine homes of cotton planters. And of
characters in scenes like this one, which he observed one evening on a
Delta plantation:

"Suddenly a wagon rumbles up out of the darkness, dripping water.
The driver jumps down from his seat, lights two or three lanterns, and
in a loud sing-song voice cries his wares:

'I got yellow cat and the white cat,

Got everything but the tom cat,

And he's on the inside.

If you believe I'm lying

Buy one and try him.

Take him home,

And then you fry him.'

'Catfish Nuggets'

Of course, the Delta Mr. Cohn described is part of a South that no
longer exists. Today, you could wait a long time on a Greenville street
for "the catfish man" to roll by. People still catch them on their own,
but catfish in modern-day Mississippi are big business--they're a crop,
grown on a massive commercial scale in man-made ponds.

Today, someone traveling to Vicksburg in search of catfish would as
likely as not be sent to The Cock of the Walk, a gimmicky theme
restaurant where the waiters dress like Mike Fink. And in many towns,
including Greenville, fast-food marketers are experimenting with
"catfish nuggets."

Like most American towns its size, today's Greenville has been
homogenized--it has its strip of fast-food franchises, discount stores,
and muffler shops, its flashing "port-a-signs," and a Ramada Inn lounge
with a band playing "nitely."

Still, there are reminders, small and large--from accents to food to
geography--that Greenville is not just anyplace. One of them is the
town's most famous restaurant, Doe's Eat Place. Said to be "a favorite
of Liza Minelli's," Doe's is a decaying structure where customers sit
near or in the kitchen and eat hot tamales, chili, and oven-broiled

slab steaks--two pounds minimum--that go for $10 a pound.

"You're paying for the atmosphere," Greenvillians jokingly say of
Doe's. And how many other towns can boast small carry-outs that sell
greasy brown bags full of "HOT Buffalo Fish"?

Also, the town retains, even in its modern state, the sense of
contrast and contradiction that so fascinated Mr. Cohn. A 10-minute
drive will take you from the sprawling mansions on Bayou Road south of
town, through the section of older white homes settled back in the
shade of Washington Avenue, to the ramshackle houses that front Highway
82 and lead to the rundown neighborhood around T.L. Weston High
School.

Taming the River

Rising above it all is the levee.

Greenville has the distinction of being Mississippi's largest river
port, even though it technically is no longer on the river. In 1935,
the citizens diverted the headstrong Mississippi, which had
periodically claimed portions of the town through floods and course
changes, by building a new system of levees. The embankment forced the
river six miles to the west, and now Greenville harbor is

actually on a man-made lake.

Delta levees are massive--they are large enough to drive on, and
roads run up their sides and along the rims. The force of the river
required as much.

In April 1927, following an autumn and winter with abnormally large
amounts of rain and snow in the many states whose waters eventually
feed into the Mississippi, the levee 20 miles above Greenville burst
and the "great flood of 1927"--probably the most disastrous in
Mississippi history--was on.

William Faulkner would later use the 1927 flood as the dramatic
setting for his novella, Old Man. Mr. Cohn described the same event
this way:

"The number of human beings drowned will never be known ... Within a
week, the inundation extended over an area 30 miles wide and 100 miles
long. The water stood from 4 to 15 feet in depth."

In Greenville, a refugee camp of some 10,000 people, mostly blacks,
sprang up on the existing levee, to remain for 70 days, until the water
subsided. A flotilla of Greenville's citizens worked constantly to keep
the encampment supplied and to rescue people stranded in the
country.

Some Greenvillians, however, did not stay to help. To William
Alexander Percy, those who fled would forever after be known simply as
"the rabbit people."

The flood reminded Delta residents, wrote Mr. Cohn, of what a
Mississippian named S.S. Prentiss had written many years before:

"When God made the world, He had a large amount of surplus water
which he turned loose and told to go where it pleased; it has been
going where it pleased ever since and that is the Mississippi
River."ah

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